Boot Camp partition with NTFS or FAT32?

Windows 7 requires NTFS and Boot Camp Assistant will do that for you.

BobTheFisherman wrote:

Windows 7 requires NTFS and Boot Camp Assistant will do that for you.

That is partially incorrect, Windows 7 does need NTFS but BCA will not 'do that for you"

BCA will only format to FAT32, during the installation you reformat to NTFS using the Windows installer!

You can also run Disk Utility to format the Boot Camp partition as NTFS, but you also need Paragon's NTFS for Mac, which works great in allowing OS X to read/write to NTFS drives.

ScuseMe wrote:

You can also run Disk Utility to format the Boot Camp partition as NTFS, but you also need Paragon's NTFS for Mac, which works great in allowing OS X to read/write to NTFS drives.

ScuseMe but this is 100% wrong, Disk Utility can not format to NTFS, please check your advice.

Not sure if DU can't, when I was using Paragon NTFS (2007) it would allow Disk Utility to do so. Not sure if there is any risk.

But if you aren't using Windows.... remove the partition in one of the supported methods.

You can also run Disk Utility to format the Boot Camp partition as NTFS, but you also need Paragon's NTFS for Mac

I would have said IF you have NTFS for OS X driver which I think is best and better than free versions, so whether you want to $$ or not.

Using tuxera I tried this, Win7 would not boot but it would install, I reformatted using MS's own tool and never bothered to try 3rd party again.

As a general rule I do not use 3rd party file system additions, and as a general rule my Macs always boot and run just fine so i keep it that way

Sorry Csound, but I'm 100% right.

DU and OS X can read/write/format NTFS with Paragon's NTFS for Mac, a product I've been using for several years. That's exactly what I said in my post.

I would not recommend a 3rd party product unless I've used it extensively, and it offered a value above and beyond free tools.

Hatter,

I've used the open-source NTFS replacements (and even some shareware ones), but NTFS for Mac is more robust and causes no problems (corruption of the NTFS volumes, kernal panics) that the other solutions seem to eventually do. My recommendation comes from years of using their products and competing products. I was a Windows server admin in a previous life, so when I moved to the Mac arena in 2007, the first thing I looked for was interoperability between Windows and OS X, the reading/writing of NTFS being a major consideration.

With Paragon's NTFS for Mac installed, DU will show 2 additional options for partition formatting - NTFS and NTFS (compressed). Very helpful if you need so quick NTFS volume formatting, and you don't have time to boot into Boot Camp or hook up the volumes to a Windows machine (I also have 3 XP computers which I frequently use; the volumes formatted by NTFS for Mac work without incident with them).

ScuseMe wrote:

Sorry Csound, but I'm 100% right.

DU and OS X can read/write/format NTFS with Paragon's NTFS for Mac, a product I've been using for several years. That's exactly what I said in my post.

I would not recommend a 3rd party product unless I've used it extensively, and it offered a value above and beyond free tools.

Not natively, but it can with 3rd party additions, which I do not recommend, so we'll differ on that one. 🙂

And for Windows installs I prefer Microsofts own technology, and using it is well documented in the BootCamp documentation.

Made the mistake of upgrading to Windows 8. A word to the wise, don't bother! Yes, it's just an opinion but there is a learning curve and it's almost a return to Vista. In any case, I needed to reestablish BootCamp and did so through the BootCamp utility. The issue arises when one attempts to install Windows 7 because a BootCamp partioned in FAT, will not work, and that's what you have staring you in the face. Although extremely apprehensive, I tried the Windows utlity available in the partition choice window and it corrected the problem. Initially, I became more apprehensive because it appeared that the partition name had been changed to something other than BootCamp. Not so . . . but didn't even look until I had everything installed. So a solution is certainly to use the Windows utility because you cannot move forward until the BootCamp partition has the proper format.